Using browser based data analysis toolkits such as pandas in IPython notebooks, or R in RStudio, means you need to have access to python or R and the corresponding application server either on your own computer, or running on a remote server that you have access to. When running occasional ... [Read more...]

Last week, a post on the ONS (Office of National Statistics) Digital Publishing blog caught my eye: Introducing the New Improved ONS API which apparently “mak[es] things much easier to work with”. Ooh… exciting…. maybe I can use this to start hacking together some notebooks?:-) It was followed ... [Read more...]

Sort of via @jottevanger, it seems that Tata Communications announces the first challenge in the F1® Connectivity Innovation Prize to extract and present new information from Formula One Management’s live data feeds. (The F1 site has a post Tata launches F1® Connectivity Innovation Prize dated “10 Jun 2014″? What’s that ... [Read more...]

I’m still hopeful of working up the idea of recreational data as a popular pastime activity with a regular column somewhere and a stocking filler book each Christmas (?!;-), but haven’t had much time to commit to working up some great examples lately:-( However, here’s a ... [Read more...]

A few weeks ago I came across IPythonBlocks, a Python library developed to support the teaching of Python programming. The library provides an HTML grid that can be manipulated using simple programming constructs, presenting the outcome of the operations in a visually meaningful way. As part of a new third ... [Read more...]

I’ve started doodling again… This time, around maps, looking for recipes that make life easier plotting lines to connect points on maps. The most attractive maps seem to use great circles to connect one point with another, these providing the shortest path between two points when you consider the ... [Read more...]

Part of my weekend ritual is to buy the weekend papers and have a go at the recreational maths problems that are Sudoku and Killer. I also look for news stories with a data angle that might prompt a bit of recreational data activity… In a paper that may or ... [Read more...]

Time was when I used to be a reasonably competent scholar, digging into the literature chasing down what folk actually said, and chasing forward to see whether claims had been refuted. Then I fell out of love with the academic literature – too many papers that said nothing, too many papers ... [Read more...]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve settled into using R an python as my languages of choice for doing stuff: R, because RStudio is a nice environment, I can blend code and text using R markdown and knitr, ggplot2 and Rcharts make generating graphics easy, and reshapers such ... [Read more...]

I’ve been doodling some chart in R/ggplot using geom_text() to generate a labelled scatterplot. The chart actually builds up several layers using different datasets, so it’s not obvious how to set the ranges cleanly: I know the lower bound I want for the y-axis (y=0), but ... [Read more...]

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but whilst many of us may get a pre-attentive gut reaction reading from a data set visualised using a chart type we’re familiar with, how many of us actually take the time to read a chart thoroughly and maybe verbalise, even ... [Read more...]

In What Role, If Any, Does Spending Data Have to Play in Local Council Budget Consultations? I started wondering about the extent to which local spending transparency data might play a role in supporting consultation around new budgets. As a first pass, I’ve popped up a quick application up ... [Read more...]

Remember Gapminder, the animated motion chart popularised by Hans Rosling in his TED Talks and Joy of Stats TV programme? Well it’s back on TV this week in Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population, a compelling piece of OU/BBC co-produced stats theatre featuring Hans Rosling, and a ... [Read more...]

In anticipation of a new R library from School of Data data diva @mihi_tr that will wrap the OpenSpending API and providing access to OpenSpending.org data directly from within R, I thought I’d start doodling around some ideas raised in Identifying Pieces in the Spending Data Jigsaw. ... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks or so ago, I picked up an inlink from an OCLC blog post about Visualizing Network Flows: Library Inter-lending. The post made use of Sankey diagrams to represent borrowing flows, and by implication suggested that the creation of such diagrams is not as easy as it ... [Read more...]

One of the things I’ve been pondering with respect to the whole data journalism process is how journalists without a lot of statistical training can quickly get a feel for whether there may be interesting story leads in a dataset, or how they might be able to fashion “alerts” ... [Read more...]

Have data – now what? Building your own interactive data explorer need not be a chore with the R shiny library… Here’s a quick walkthrough… In Datagrabbing Commonly Formatted Sheets from a Google Spreadsheet – Guardian 2014 University Guide Data, I showed how to grab some data from several dozen commonly formatted ... [Read more...]

So it seems like it’s that time of year when the Guardian publish their university rankings data (Datablog: University guide 2014), which means another opportunity to have a tinker and see what I’ve learned since last year… (Last year’s hack was a Filtering Guardian University Data Every Which ... [Read more...]

Last year I sat on a couple of panels organised by I’m a Scientist’s Shane McCracken at various science communication conferences. A couple of days ago, I noticed Shane had popped up a post asking Who are you Twitter?, a quick review of a social media mapping exercise ... [Read more...]

Just over a year or so ago, Mat Morrison/@mediaczar introduced me to a visualisation he’d been working on (How should Page Admins deal with Flame Wars?) that I started to refer to as an accession chart (Visualising Activity Around a Twitter Hashtag or Search Term Using R). The ... [Read more...]